Technology, Drama, the Market, and I

March 14, 2012

My South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) experience began on the “nerdbird” – the flight from San Francisco to Austin. At high altitude and in even higher amplitude, the techies sitting a row behind me were speed-outsmarting each other, jumping from database mining, the UX challenge of creating a human-friendly pixel resolution, the myth of interferences for avionics, to the “stupid-smart Nathans” in their lives (sorry, guys, it was hard not to eavesdrop). I first listened with intrigue (because these guys were really, really smart, and I might as well just transcribe their conversation into a comprehensive SXSW summary post), but after a while I began to resist the unsolicited expertise, and browsing through the conference program I couldn’t help but think of my two favorite session titles this year: “Co-Founder Speed Dating” and “The Evolution of the Douchebag in Modern Cinema.” Giving up on my way-too-thin headphones, I craved an enclave that would offer asylum from the forced intimacy of all the power-chatter, a simple switch-off that would disconnect me from verbal deluge and provides some kind of digital refuge from the very human analogue conversation. With all the new services that enable ‘controlled serendipity,’ it seems ironic that social filtering assumes we constantly want to meet people. I wanted to un-meet. Now. And there was no app for that.

Obviously, the signs of the times are different. Social discovery was a main theme of SXSWi this year. Start-ups from Uberlife, Sonar, to Crowded Room were vying for the pole position in the race to become the de-facto in-situ connectors. The winner, I would submit, will be the one service that manages to balance the need to “find the like-minded” (predictability) with the desire to “discover the unexpected” (serendipity). The path between the two is where true meaning occurs. Being a social utility is not enough – the best matchmakers understand that their job is to put on a great game, not to predict its outcome.

Another theme was the browser vs. OS war, extending the conversation from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that had preceded SXSWi. In light of the emergence of HTML 5 and Mozilla’s recently announced, much gushed about Open Web Devices (OWD) partnership with Spanish carrier Telefonica, the browser-OS web apps vs. native apps showdown drew a lot of attention. As Wireless Watch writes: “HTML5 is coming close to delivering the same quality of experience for web apps as native ones, and with its cross-platform nature can, theoretically at least, break the ties with the OS and allow non-platform owners such as operators or web service providers to create their own brand and distinctive offerings for any device.” My colleague Scott Jenson, creative director at frog, and a speaker at SXSWi, expects this trend to deliver on the promise of “just-in-time interaction,” allowing a far more seamless, personalized, and localized user experience than the super-fragmented native apps ecosystem can deliver today.

SXSWi was bigger, noisier, and messier than ever, and it was hard not get frustrated by the abundance of options and the scarcity of seats. But while there were some pleasant surprises (e.g. a session with “Catch Me If You Can” con artist Frank Abagnale), some panel topics are apparently evergreen. You could still find panels on crowdsourcing and branding in a social media world. The tone, however, was distinct this time: the digital literacy has increased exponentially, far beyond the tech in-crowd. The confidence and techno-swagger were staggering. And everyone, I mean, really everyone, was in town – hardcore digerati, outliers, cultural observers, and more and more business bigwigs. Location matters, and there is no place like SXSWi. Somewhere between hubris and pragmatism, the tech pilgrimage to Austin forms a unique geekipedia, a vast knowledge library, a mega-download of the future to come.

Speaking of which, the “Future of Work” was subject of a dedicated program track this year, and strikingly, eight years after the release of Thomas Malone’s seminal book, the main takeaway from the sessions was that the Future of Work may have already arrived – without us noticing it and indeed not evenly distributed. This became most apparent in a panel on “Decentralized Organizations - Do They Work?” with representatives from Zappos, Burning Man, Second Life-founder Philip Rosedale’s new company Coffee & Power, a marketplace for “small jobs”, and Malone himself. After several failed attempts to get a discussion going beyond just sharing anecdotes, a simple show of hands by the audience made clear that the session title was a rhetorical question. Of course decentralized organizations work. At least for a crowd like SXSWi, for which job title is oh-so-yesterday and even the online social status seems antiquated. The new currency is your latest venture.

Most of the people in the room appeared acutely aware of what Malone described as the historic opportunity in front of us: “For the first time we can combine the benefits of large organizations with the benefits of decentralized individual decision-making.” Indeed, if you combine economies of scale with the value of intimacy, you yield the “Economics of Emotion,” as Alan Zorfas coins them. In his recent article, he references a recent IBM survey poll of 1,700 CMOs who emphasized that building an enduring emotional connection with consumers is fast becoming a top business imperative.

Ironically, the very emotional bond, the very humanity we espouse as value in organizational designs, may be threatened by the technology we create: “True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence,” the ever witty philosopher and writer Alain de Botton poignantly tweeted during the conference (perhaps during a date gone awry).

Keynote speaker Baratunde Thurston (The Onion) heralded the power of “laughter against the machine,” the importance of “artful ridicule,” of “comedy in the code”, and presented examples from various countries – from China to Afghanistan, Iran to Egypt. Not just coding or decoding, aggregating or analyzing, but “reading the world,” he argued, was an ever more important task in this day and age of big data, and as both institutions and experts experience an erosion of their authority, he demanded comedians step in as the new sense makers, the new interpreters who laugh off the tragic with humor. Thurston cited an Old Roman proverb, and his points were not breaking new ground by any means. But his humble and genuine delivery captivated the audience and was touching. As history has told us, it is the fools who speak the truth and foresee the future. Or you can just use Forecast, a social tool that asks “What are you going to do?” and thus captures a valuable aggregation of the likely future based on intentions.

Aside from all that, another key insight from SXSWi this year was that, as with every human enterprise, the effects of horserace politics have begun to kick in. It is now the Super Bowl for tech marketers. From political theatre to tech theatre – the backstory has become the actual story: Egos, plots, gossip, and campaigns trump the actual program. This year’s most controversial “meta-story” was BBH Lab’s Homeless HotSpots campaign – a “social experiment” that had been launched before SXSWi but reached a broader and more critical audience here that was quick in dismissing it as a ludicrous exploitation of homeless people. It is interesting to read The Atlantic’s analysis of how the public’s reaction went through all of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief, but whatever you think of the appropriateness of the idea, the HotSpots campaign presented a welcome counterpoint to the dominant techno-optimism at the show – a gloomy and inadvertently comical question-mark amidst all the exclamation points. The same audience that had laughed about Baratunde Thurston’s irreverence was irritated by the absurd theater of the Homeless HotSpots, and the discomfort expressed in many blogs represented an underlying sentiment that may have gotten lost otherwise at SXSWi: social technology has invaded our lives, but it may not be the great socializer. Or as a colleague admitted over dinner: “Here I am with 17,000 like-minded souls and a dozen of social discovery tools, but when I wander through the halls, I couldn’t help but feel lonely at times.”

February 13, 2011

We live in a connected world. This may sound like a trite statement at first glance, but like many coinages of this kind it has entered our collective vocabulary by moving straight from provocative insight to cliché to mainstream reality. And as I am headed to the Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona, the largest gathering of the wireless industry (50,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibitors), I’m probably not the only one noticing the unique historical backdrop that underlies the event this year and gives ever more credence to the seismic economic, cultural, social, and political shifts triggered by the universal power of connectivity. The Mobile World Congress, perhaps, would be more aptly dubbed World Congress, if you were to describe the far-flung implications of communication technology, much of which is now mobile.

Just 48 hours ago, the Egyptian people succeeded in peacefully forcing Mubarak out of office, a triumph that was made possible, in large part, because a critical mass of the population was able to augment their protest through communication technologies, defying even a temporary nationwide network shutdown ordered by the government, and proving wrong skeptics such as Malcom Gladwell (who contends that “the revolution will not be tweeted”) or Evgeny Morozov (who exposes the 'dark side' of the social media revolution). As Alexia Tsotsis points out in her Techcrunch piece “Mubarak Shut Down The Internet, And The Internet Paid Him In Kind”: “Pulling a country of 82 million people, around 17 million Internet users, 60 million cellphone subscribers, 7 million home phones, and 5 million Facebook users offline essentially created the largest flashmob ever, with around 8 million protesters in the streets across Egypt today according to reports.” From the creative use of location-based mobile services to third-party 'virtualized'Twitter services that convert voice messages into live-tweets, there has been a whole array of innovations born out of necessity. A more thorough analysis is pending, but at this point it is fair to say that social media and wireless technologies have played a pivotal role in the Egyptian revolution, mobilizing, organizing, and accelerating (18 days!) the collective uprising, and bringing it to the world’s media attention.

At a more generic level, the Egyptian events are the latest exclamation mark behind a burgeoning trend. The young people of Egypt are exemplary of a new generation of empowered citizens and consumers for whom buy-in is beholden to having access to the network, both, literally, the communications network and the more abstract network of social, economic, and political connections that warrant their future. Not to stretch the analogy too much, but they want a better user experience that gives them more control, with their government providing a robust platform upon which they can access or develop compelling apps. It will be hard to put the lid back on this tremendous desire of the ‘digital natives’ to be entrepreneurial and innovative, and to co-create their societies rather than just being their passive, disenfranchised consumers and citizens. While many doubt that Egypt, despite the first rumblings in Jordan and Algeria, will be the role model for an immediate chain reaction of revolutions throughout the Middle East, it has certainly changed the fault lines of an already fragile power landscape. Sooner rather than later, these regimes will have to open their “walled gardens” - or they “will sink in the sand,” as Hillary Clinton so undiplomatically stated.

Indeed, mobile technologies are enabling massive power shifts and behavioral changes in the fields of governance and civil society, and they are rapidly becoming the hope of entire populations in the Middle East and other emerging regions. But they are also disrupting the developed economies: As mobile technology has penetrated our lives, it’s only logical that the tradeshow cum conference in Barcelona has become a hub far beyond the confines of the mobile industry. Through ubiquitous computing, the rise of the “Internet of Things,” and personal data proliferation, wireless communications and business models have reshaped many of the world’s largest industries and continue to drive disruptive innovation at a global scale (just see Mary Meeker’s update on Mobile Internet Trends, published a couple of weeks ago). No longer only telecom equipment manufacturers, ISV’s, device manufacturers, and carriers convene for a week of networking, trendspotting, deal-making, and boasting in Barcelona, the Mobile World Congress is now the place-to-be for every organization with customers who demand 'connected experiences:' from governments to NGOs to corporations in retail, healthcare, energy, automotive, media, and entertainment.

At the heart of this connectivity lies a broader concept of network, and it has a number of implications. First of all, every company betting on connectivity needs a network strategy – or more, precisely, a networks strategy that stitches together a subset of networks allowing it to leverage talent, attention, social capital, and IP for each of its inter-and transactions. This may include but is not limited to networks of supply, product development, and delivery partners (infrastructure); networks of buyers and potential buyers; and knowledge and innovation networks frequented by start-ups, academia, social entrepreneurs, developers, and passionate users. With these networks closely inter-connected and partly overlapping, not only do companies benefit from intra-network effects (by which the value of the network increases exponentially with the number of users), but also from inter-network effects (by which the value of the network increases exponentially with the number of interdependent networks) as these networks co-evolve.

“Smart” mobile companies – and who doesn’t need to be one, no matter what industry – have three options: build their own networks, acquire them, or join those of others. Cases in point: Nokia, which decided to do the latter with its Microsoft partnership. Or AOL, whose acquisition of the Huffington Post as well as previous investments into web properties indicate its aim to become a network of media networks. Apple of course, has built (and tightly controlled) its own supplier, customer, and developer networks, foregoing the need to activate or participate in third-party (knowledge or innovation) networks because it is in the privileged position of having a salience of talent behind its own walls. Its brand pull is so strong that it doesn’t need to cultivate many network connections to attract knowledge.

The keys to the mobile kingdom, however, remain in the hands of the “master of the network of networks” – the player that can own and nurture all the various networks listed above and combine them into one cohesive super-network, a self-organized smart system with seamless interfaces and considerable economies of scale. A critical building block of this network is what KPCB’s John Doerr calls the SoLoMo combination: Social, local, mobile. That’s the race Google, Twitter, and Facebook are in.

Secondly, every organization that pursues a networks strategy in the connectivity game needs to become a ‘software organization.’ For starters, it needs to foster its software capabilities and create software offerings. In the telco space, communications service providers are doing exactly that, propelled by the rise of cloud computing and M2M business models, as well as infrastructure and services demand from adjacent “connected” verticals such as energy or healthcare. Similarly, airlines have begun to reorient their businesses around software solutions, and are already providing logistical, CRM, and yield management software solutions to competitors and customers outside of aviation.

But there is another dimension to this: software as an organizing principle. Organizations have to become software organizations in the way they structure themselves and operate, shifting from a linear, static, and robust model of planning and executing on strategy, to a more fluid, non-linear, agile, and distributed approach that allows knowledge, the capital of the 21st century, to quickly flow through their organizations. Stuart Evans, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Homa Bahrami, a professor at Berkeley Haas School of Business, have coined the term “super-flexibility” to pinpoint this new set of capabilities and define it as “the capacity to transform by adapting to new realities, underpinned by the ability to withstand turbulence by creating stable anchors.” They propose that instead of thinking about strategy as a single best approach, “developing super-flexible strategies involves switching between a portfolio of initiatives. Business leaders have to ‘maneuver’ their strategic trajectory, like changing gears in a car.” Further: “A super-flexible organization is multi-polar, with several centers of gravity. It is much like a living organism with multiple brains, but these move in the same direction, like a flock of birds or a school of fish. Just like an individual, a super-flexible organization has three core building blocks – the ‘anatomy’ (the accountability and reporting structure), the ‘personality’ or its culture and identity, and most important of all, its ‘circulation’ or how people interact and how information moves throughout the organization. The biggest challenge in a dynamic world is to monitor and synchronize the three building blocks, and make appropriate adjustments as priorities evolve.”

Networks of networks, SoLoMo, super-flexibility – these are just some of the new paradigms that emanate from permanent connectivity and will impact mobile innovation as much as they are driven by it.

December 25, 2010

This was India’s year. Obama visited, as did Sarkozy, and many other statesmen of lesser political weight or star appeal. With an annual growth rate of close to 8.9% and foreign direct investments projected to exceed $100 billion, the booming Indian economy defied the global recession. For the first time ever, eight Indian companies made it onto the Fortune 500 global list. And even PR crises like the ill-organized Commonwealth Games and political corporate scandals that were an easy target for India’s cynical media did not eclipse the nation's staggering rise – in fact, these events just seemed to magnify the spotlight. Without a doubt, the sub-continent became ready for primetime in 2010, and to many outside observers a new confidence appeared to take hold of India’s economic and intellectual elite.

This year also marked my first visit to India. I had the privilege of assuming leadership for a team in Gurgaon (New Delhi), Bangalore, and Chennai, and to immerse myself in a country I had never been to before. I vividly remember the first five minutes after my arrival at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi in September, the dusty air, the thick fog, the vanilla scented perfume tree in the car, and the calm driver whom I, for lack of any alternative, decided to wholeheartedly trust as he was racing me to my hotel amidst the polyphony of honks. Other countries are in your face or slowly creep into your soul with their mores, oddities, and sensations. India is around you, all the time. It is simple as the tourist cliché of itself (especially when you live in the airport-lounge-and-luxury-hotel bubble of the global business traveler) and yet complex as a vertical staggering of infinite parallel worlds which make sense each by themselves but fail to strike a consonant chord – like in the movie Inception.

When I attended the India Economic Summit in Delhi in November a few weeks after my first trip, jointly hosted (for the 26th time) by the World Economic Forum and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), President Obama had just passed through India, leaving an indelible mark on the Indian collective psyche with his now famous line that “India is not emerging, it has emerged.” The mood was bullish, if not exuberant, and many considered the visit a breakthrough moment for India. The economic reality had not changed but the awareness of the sheer scale of the opportunity ahead and the self-assurance that it might indeed be feasible to accomplish it, had moved to a whole new level, seemingly overnight. No wonder the optimism was palpable at the Summit.

The official theme was “Implementing India” but the actual theme that emerged during the three conference days was “Inclusive Growth” – how can India sustain its tremendous growth and at the same time narrow the social divide? While India’s growth numbers are impressive, many of the speakers acknowledged that its so-called “demographic dividend” (a term coined by Harvard demograph David Bloom) is a double-edged sword. By 2020 half of India’s population will be below 25, and it will account for 25% of the global workforce. But this demographic trend is unevenly distributed. India’s northern states, with their high fertility rates, are the main contributors to population growth (by 2025, the median age will be 26) whereas the south faces rapid aging (a median age of 34 by 2025). This means that “India’s demographic dividend is actually a double hump, one of which is already nearly exhausted,” Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekan writes in his seminal book Imagining India.

This “double hump” makes capitalizing on the remaining, “unexpensed” demographic dividend rather urgent. Experts foresee a demographic disaster unless India’s young workforce is properly skilled and employable by global standards. Unfortunately this is far from being the case today: For starters, 300 million people live in extreme poverty, that is, they live on less than one dollar per day, and 90% work in the informal economy. 70% of India’s 509 million-strong working population has not received a primary education, and only 11% of those aged 17-23 receive a higher education. India has the lowest education indicators among the G20 economies and the world’s highest number of illiterate people. One of the main challenges for India will be to create jobs for the 270 million people expected to enter the working-age population over the next 20 years. Will these people become the world’s workforce, as some predict, or the world’s worry?

Sustainable growth, many argue, will come from frugal (or reverse) social innovation, through public-private partnerships that scale at the base of the pyramid. It is well known that IBM has more employees in India than in any other country, and many of India’s big IT outsourcing companies (e.g. Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services etc.) have long been competing with multinationals. But no longer is India just the development center of excellence of the world or an emerging consumer market of massive scale; it is increasingly home to bottom-up innovations in areas such as energy, healthcare, and automotive, spurred by the urgency of structural change. Crisis has always proven to be a hotbed of innovation, and the need to improve the livelihood of a society is a powerful driver for entrepreneurship.

India is already the front of some radical product and service innovations such as the $3,000 car or the two cents per minute nationwide cell phone service. Moreover, with the deep penetration of low-cost telephony, the country’s emerging middle class could be a testing ground for the burgeoning mobile health (mHealth) technology market, in particular telemedicine and rapid diagnostic services. Globally, mHealth revenues are projected to grow by 25% annually, from $1.5 billion in 2010 to $4.6 billion by 2014. India is seeing many of its pioneering efforts, for example start-ups such as mDhil and eHealthpoints. The Indian healthcare industry, in general, is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, growing at 23% per annum.

A basic enabler of “inclusive growth” is to provide the rural population with access to information- and communication technologies and financial services. Although India is the second largest telecom market in the world and tele-density has increased to 56.6% in 2010, 44% of rural Indian households are still unwired, and of India’s 6,000,000 rural villages less than ten percent have a local bank branch. Microfinance, long heralded as an able solution to this shortcoming, has recently suffered a serious setback. The rapidly growing private microcredit industry faced imminent collapse when almost all borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, stopped repaying their loans. Critics accused microfinance institutions of making “hyperprofits off the poor” by extending loans to poor villagers at exorbitant interest rates and without enough regard for their ability to repay. It will take some time for the industry to restore trust (and some more regulatory oversight from the state will help, too). But again, this crisis may spur much needed innovation in the Mobile Money space.

India’s villages are increasingly becoming a breeding ground for innovation, as its rural poor develop inventions out of necessity. Mansukhbhai Jagani, Mansukhbhai Patel, Mansukhbhai Prajapati, and Madanlal Kumawat, and three others are on a recent Forbes list of rural Indian entrepreneurs (compiled by IIM-Ahmedabad professor Anil K. Gupta) “whose inventions are changing lives” of the people across the country. Jagani developed a motorcycle-based tractor for India's poor farmers, which is both cost effective – costing roughly $318 – and fuel efficient. A farmer, Patel invented a cotton stripping machine that significantly cut the cost of cotton farming and revolutionized India’s cotton industry. Prajapati, a potter, invented a clay non-stick pan that costs Rs 100 and a clay refrigerator that runs without electricity for those who cannot afford a fridge or their electricity and maintenance costs. Madanlal Kumawat, a grassroots innovator with no more than a fourth-grade education, developed a fuel-efficient, multi-crop thresher that yields cleaner grains, which can be bagged directly and eliminates the cost of cleaning.

Design and design-driven innovation are quickly entering the business vocabulary here, too, and when I met with editors of business publications in Delhi a few weeks ago, their interest in design was as keen as their conviction that India will soon become a powerful innovation engine with global impact, propelled by a distinct national design style and a throng of young, ambitious, and fearless entrepreneurs. It will require a mix of national policy and education providing the economic framework, global design and innovation firms bringing quality standards and best practices to India, and – perhaps most importantly – Indian companies embracing design as a key differentiator and value-driver, with some quick and visible market successes.

Whether you’re strolling through Old Delhi or driving along the campuses of Bangalore’s IT firms, you can’t help but marvel at the tremendous pace with which the country and its people are happening. The whole country is on the move, which offers plenty of opportunities for upward social mobility but also disrupts traditional lifestyles and cultures. New high-rise developments for the burgeoning middle class (91 million urban households are projected to be part of it by 2030, up from 22 million today) stand in stark contrast to the poor villages right next to them, which are in the progress of upending their local identities and cultural roots. According to the United Nations Development program, it is expected that 41% of India’s population will live in cities by 2020, compared to less than 30% in 2010. That is 590 million people, nearly twice the population of the US today. A recent McKinsey report (“India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth”) estimates that 70% of net new employment will be generated in cities by 2030 and that 85% of total tax revenue will come from the urban economy.

Needless to say, that this migration will further contribute to stresses on the already insufficient infrastructure. McKinsey expects 68 Indian cities to have a population of more than one million by 2030 (up from 42 today vs. 35 in Europe). It warns that the current urban policy framework will lead to urban decay and gridlock. Today, India is investing eight percent of its GDP in infrastructure, which is a high number by international standards. And as much as $300 billion are forecast to be devoted to urban infrastructure over the next 20 years, a twofold increase in per capita spending of $17 today. But McKinsey believes that $1.2 trillion capital investments are necessary to meet the projected demand in Indian cities. The firm proposes fundamental city governance reforms to ensure these funds are not only raised but put to work efficiently. Unlike China, India cannot issue sharp policy shifts to appease a young population that may not be satisfied with the living standards of their parents. If urban policies fail, social upheaval, fuelled by underlying religious and ethnic divides, will likely be the result. Or as Nandan Nilekan puts it: “This is our biggest, but also our last chance.”

India is aware of its “moment” and understands that the window of opportunity for inclusive growth is limited. The government is seeking to balance the hustle, the frenzy, and the urgency with calm and confidence. It is the only possible attitude when you have to govern what seems to be genuinely ungovernable. I thought of a line from a song by Thom Yorke: “You have all the time in the world. Don’t squander it.”

[picture: painting by Vangobot. Vangobot is "a robot who paints with the soul of the human artists who taught him how to see."]

July 24, 2010

From “marketing in the age of streams” to the “Googlization of media” to “situational awareness” to “location, location, locaton” to “business becomes social” to “private becomes public” – in their latest report, Edelman’s digital mavens Steve Rubel and David Armano provide a solid overview of the six key digital trends to watch.

December 26, 2009

Describing itself as "a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies," Lift is definitely one of the best conference networks out there. Laurent Haug, Lift founder and curator, is a wonderful host and has managed to maintain a strong sense of community despite continued growth. In addition to numerous satellite events with partners, Lift organizes conferences in France and Korea, as well as the annual Lift conference in Switzerland as its main hub.

Lift10 will take place from May 5-7, 2010 in Geneva and welcome 1,000 participants from 40 countries to "explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in the techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects. They adopt or refute, promote or demote; embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design and innovation, it's time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the 'connected people.'"

December 08, 2009

I attended the Trendforum in Munich last week (frog was a sponsor), a two-day conference that gathered European innovation, marketing, and R&D executives to explore emerging technologies, social trends, and innovative business models. The program was eclectic and the content mostly of high quality. I was particularly intrigued by the opening session that intersected macro-economic forecasting with geeky trend evangelism as well as a humanistic pledge for meaning-driven business (in fact, the other sessions didn’t even come close, including special guest Ray Kurzweil, whose remote keynote, given by way of 3D-holographic projection, remained utterly flat).

As the first speaker, Dr. Markku Wilenius, Senior Vice President, Economic Research and Corporate Development with Allianz SE, set the framework by introducing overarching future themes, key challenges facing mankind, from climate change to water scarcity to demographic developments. Forecasting the economic development over the next two decades, he predicted redefined notions and metrics of both societal progress and individual success, and heralded “true value accounting” that would ultimately “decouple consumption from growth.” In ten years, he argued, easy and seamless sustainable choices would have become the norm, as would have “smarter systems.” Wilenius identified four key consumer trends, all to be filed under Consumer Empowerment: Downshifting (simplicity -> value for money, price sensitivity, discounts); Transparency (clarity -> open communicatons, clear essence); Selfness (control -> self-governance, tangibility); and Age of Less (substance -> long-term thinking, lightness). Despite the daunting challenges in these times of crisis, his outlook remained optimistic: “Material scarcity always creates an abundance of ideas.” If that is true, we can look forward to innovative times in which creativity will not only become a crucial skill but an existential means of survival.

Dr. Christine Woesler de Panafieu, founder of CoSight, an international trend research and marketing consulting firm in Paris, picked up the ball and described how the macro-trends Wilenius had pinpointed would alter the lives of consumers. She argued that we were moving from "post- to ultra-modernity," resulting in a renaissance of the renaissance: “the man as measure of all things.” This neo-humanistic mindset would bear a new spiritual quest – “an individual, open path seeking direct resonance with the sacred,” as she put it. The number of pilgrimages is indeed on the rise, as is the number of new religions (and meta-religions such as the recent Charter of Compassion or the portal Beliefnet). “The 21st century will be spiritual or it won’t be at all,” Dr. Woesler de Panafieu quoted a French philosopher. Morality is in high demand, but doing good is shifting from convention to conviction, from a humanitarian to an empowerment approach. For brands, this means they need to become the “right thing to do.” And one only has to look as far as Foursquare to see that converting social currency into real value will the business model of the future.

Nils Müller, founder and CEO of TrendONE, a trend research firm, finally took the audience on a riveting tour de force through much buzzed-about emerging tech trends, envisioning the future in 2020 as a seamless blend between the real and virtual worlds, dominated by location-based, real-time, and social computing applications that turn the Internet into an "Outernet" and “every interface into a surface” – from printed electronics to face recognition to augmented social shopping. He depicted an evolution from “lean back” to “move forward” to “jump in” to “always-on” to “plug in” media. And he showed tons of videos: the "Siftables" - see picture above; the inevitable Microsoft Natal clip; a demo of brainwave-based voiceless communications (theaudeo.com), and a clip on augmented vision enabled by eye chips (tat.se). Their common thread: Technology in disguise, with front-ends that are becoming touchable, intuitive, and human-centric. Mueller coined the term “Shytech” for this phenomenon: technology that can afford to be non-intrusive because it is fully immersive.

In the concluding panel discussion, Dr. Woesler de Panafieu was asked what’s left to do for designers when everything was immersive and one great computing cloud. “Designers’ task will be to make the invisible visible,” she said, “creating the new interaction codes of our societies.” That again alluded to the big mega-trend of Good Computing – without Computers. Designers are the ones who can translate data (and meta-data) into meaning and make morality tangible amidst a flood of information. As they visualize the dematerialization of products and services, how long will it take before the dematerialized world becomes the ideal one?

March 05, 2009

I've been conference-hopping through Europe for the past two weeks. In Berlin, I discussed new "quality of life" concepts for Germany, and in Geneva I listened to speakers who held utopian visions from an earlier era accountable for what could have been but wasn't. My own personal well-being was more mundane. I schlepped two big suitcases with me and saw the sun shine only twice. When you travel so much, you start to feel like Tyler Brule: Quality of life is defined by the quality of the airports you pass through, the quality of the WiFi connections, the quality of the hotel room showers, the quality of the food in the random restaurant next to your hotel, and the quality of the casual human interactions along the way. Really, it's that simple. Travel, as we know, makes the human all too human, bringing to the forefront the five basic human desires that David Rose described in his LIFT09 talk: the desire to know, the desire to protect, the desire to heal, the desire to communicate, and the desire to travel.

Indeed, life is basic when you travel, yet I am frustrated with my inability to process the complexity of everything I hear and see on the road. I know I should blog about all the panels I've attended but I can't even decipher my notes anymore because they're a week old and life has changed. "We must write the story before we forget," as CERN's James Gillies noted in his LIFT09 talk about the origins of the Internet. We live in the now and here, and there is no there there.

Not impressed

Mindful of this preamble, the LIFT09 conference, dedicated to discussing the social implications of technology, came with a special twist this year. Bypassing the here and now, it attempted to directly link yesterday and tomorrow: "Where did the future go?" was the big question during the two days in Geneva, and the program was carefully designed to draw lessons from "a history of the future" in order to develop more enlightened concepts for tomorrow. Re-booting the future, so to speak.

In keeping with the current grim economic mood, the conference bemoaned the shallow glory of sci-fi future visions that, to date, haven't lived up to their promise. What is worse though? Dystopian visions that have become real or utopian visions that haven't? For Patrick J. Gyger, a Swiss historian, curator, and writer, it is clearly the latter. He revisited former notions of the future and investigated what became of them: "What happened to the flying car?" Well, it actually made it to market, like many other product aspirations, yet without much fanfare. Or as Gyger dryly remarked: "The future is here and we're not impressed." Instead, a profound disillusionment with technology-driven visions of a better life has kicked in (space travel, end of poverty, the smart Internet, anyone?), and free-market capitalism has betrayed the idea of sustainable prosperity.

Nicolas Nova applied this retro-skeptical view to the world of business, walking the audience through "the recurring failure of holy grails." He presented a nonchalant history of product flops (from the picture phone to the smart fridge to location-based services), which were in his judgment all hampered by "over-optimism," "lack of knowledge," and "blind faith in the Zeitgeist." Yet I found his definition of product success flawed as it was obviously based on the principle of mass adoption – a questionable proposition in times of increasingly fragmented audiences and micro-markets. Which new product – besides maybe the iPod and the iPhone – has really gone mainstream in the past ten years? Many of the products and technologies Nova stigmatized as "failures" have found their audience in some form and created significant value both for their inventors and consumers. Yet we simply fail to recognize their success since it occurs in market niches and communities.

Both Nova and Gyger heralded a more pragmatic model of future-oriented thinking. But I'm not sure if I share their skepticism towards grand visions. What if the future has arrived, however – to paraphrase William Gibson – it is so widely distributed (that is, buried in fragmented micro-markets) that we don't notice it? Lives in the open

In any case, for a no-show, the future was still suspiciously present at LIFT09. Matt Webb (co-author of "Mind Hacks") described "the pleasure of watching things unfold" and recommended a "narrative" process for invention and creation (of which his Olinda radio prototype is a brilliant example), highlighting in particular the role of writing in the context of design: "Design is a way of walking over the landscape of possible worlds."

Fabio Sergio, creative director at frog design's Milan studio, laid out the power of "design thinking for the future." He used the case study of Project Masiluleke (a large-scale initiative that leverages mobile technologies to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa) to illustrate a model of design that "is not about creating compelling visions of perfect futures but rather shaping betas of presents of a future we want to live in." Quoting an Italian bus customer ("In the past you had to stamp the ticket. Now you simply have to caress the machine."), he spanned the arch from 'form follows function' to 'form follows emotion' to 'form follows meaning' (design that resonates with people's value systems). Empathy, technology as "material to sketch with," people-centered user experiences, and social impact – these are, according to Sergio, the characteristics of "meaningful design."

Empathy, in particular, is not only the foundation for meaningful social innovation projects (pro-bono or for-profit), it is also the very prerequisite for every act of human cooperation. Sympathy creates compassion, empathy breeds solidarity.
However, solidarity does not always mean consensus, as UCLA's Ramesh Srinivasan pointed out. He suggested the indigenous use of digital objects and called for systems that "celebrate difference" instead of eradicating it.

Finally, Bill Thompson's vision of the future was optimistically fatalistic or pessimistically upbeat, depending on your point of view. He rocked the house with a provocative obituary. "Privacy is dead," he argued passionately, "get over it!" Instead of complaining about this, Thompson pledged we should embrace the new freedom that comes with radical transparency. The abstract of his talk is so succinct that I simply want to repost it here verbatim:

"The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality', how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted - in all senses - disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human."

This new post-privacy era is not without risks: Thompson conceded that "some will suffer, some will even suffer imprisonment." But that wouldn't release us, the digital avant-garde, from our responsibilities. His mandate for the creative tech community assembled at LIFT09 was in fact a moral obligation: "You need to act as mentors for everyone living their life in the open."

December 21, 2008

"I used to do a lot of traveling. First it was to see the graves of my literary heroes like Yeats (Sligo, Ireland) and Keats (Rome) and then it became something of a sight seeing tour – you know, a more traditional traipse to museums, temples, and historic and natural wonders.

Eventually, though, I traveled just to get away – to see how far away I could get, both literally and figuratively. I wanted to feel the distance, and I wanted to become completely removed from what I’d always known, to really step outside my own culture and experience what it was like to live in Sydney, Nepal, Thailand, or Honduras.

It was a long journey. All told, it took me seven years before I could comfortably accept that it was time to stop moving around the world and start moving at home (we don’t ever stop moving). During that time, I saw a lot and met a lot of people, but one of the most gratifying elements of my travels was the movement. There were times – a lot of times – in which I didn’t want to experience any more culture, or see another temple, or sit on another beach. I just wanted to move. So I’d get on a bus or boat or train and I’d leave just to be leaving, just to be moving.

With the upcoming issue of design mind (due out January 22nd), we wanted to capture this notion of movement in as many ways possible. People, ideas, and technologies move for many different reasons, and motion itself isn’t always what it seems. Our cover artist, French photographer Denis Darzacq, wanted to document the downfall of a generation of Parisians in his photo essay, La Chute, which translates to “The Fall.” And David Hoffer points out in his upcoming article, “Slow Innovation,” that new ideas may ricochet around the culture like pin balls but the ideas that really last move more like molasses in winter.

Also, what are we missing if we move so fast? Tjeerd Hoek explains the job of designing the spaces between moments. And what can we do if we can’t stop moving? frog President Doreen Lorenzo writes a touching essay about Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, in which she discusses her son’s successful bout with the diagnosis, in an article called “The Unique Brain: The link between ADHD and creativity is turning a problem into a gift.”

Of course, travel itself is many different things for different people. I plane hopped for pleasure, but my experience was nothing like the travelers in our feature story “Confessions of Extreme Air Travelers,” some of whom spend more than 300 days a year working the security lines and angling for the exit row seat (they have it down pat, by the way).

It’s also fair to ask about the auto industry. What will become of it? Our designers have their opinions on how we drive in an article entitled “Driver Experience Design.” Most auto innovations have come under the hood, but we think it’s time they get in the cockpit.

The farthest away I ever felt on my travels was Perth, Australia, and the farthest away from home I ever felt was, ironically, in Canada. But some of my fondest memories are of the transit between those places, when I abandon my expectations and stopped checking the train schedules – those times when I gave myself over to the passing of time and to the pure, comforting feeling you get when you can’t be anywhere else.

Look for design mind issue 9, Motion, in bookstores and for sale on this website in the new year. Until then, happy travels."

December 07, 2008

The world is small. Art has known this for centuries and embraced a tradition that goes all the way back to Zen: the ability to reduce the complexity of the world into small things and short forms, geared towards niche audiences. Poets, novelists, sculptors, painters, and composers have always had an affinity for the beauty of small things and short forms -- sonnets; Cycladic figurines; La Rochefoucauld's Maximes; the two-and-a-half minutes of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10; photomicrography; Very Small Buildings in architecture; or the Japanese haiku. All these artifacts are tiny in scale, short in duration, and excessively modest in the claims they make on our attention. They occupy very little time or space and imprint themselves only lightly on the human senses -- like a stinging ray of light that illuminates hearts and minds for the blink of an eye and celebrates the presence of absence.

A particularly moving example is Hemingway's super-short tale "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The loquacious laconic of Hemingway's micro-story has now been given a new congenial forum with the emergence of micro-blogging -- an obvious match. New York Times writer Matt Richtel is writing a "Twiller," a murder mystery story in 140-character increments starring hookers, killers, and (surprise!) Barack Obama (more about him later). Other micro-story attempts on Twitter include Small Places, Slice, novelsin3lines, GoodCaptain, Twittories (a "Twiller" wiki), and Copyblogger's Twitter writing contest from earlier this year. Moreover, there are off-Twitter programs such as Wired Magazine's Very Short Story collection from 2006 (that featured six-word stories by renowned futurists and science fiction writers), mobile phone novels (so called "keitai shousetus," big in Japan), Nokia's (Wieden + Kennedy's) ad campaign "Somebody Else's Phone," Shortfolio (a blog that publishes stories with less than 500 words), Facebook application Just Three Words, and Brave New Fiction, a web site that helps writers compose entire stories by writing one 140-character line every day. Baby steps towards "War and Peace." And this is just the top of a whole long tail of short tales…

For (micro-) novelists, structural constraints (which, as we all know, fuel creativity) may result in "saying more with less," but how do you express big ideas such as, say, philosophical treatises, in micro-formats? That seems more of a challenge -- although one could argue that "what cannot be twittered, must remain in silence" (to paraphrase Ars Technica's cute paraphrasing of Wittgenstein).

This raises a bigger question: What if, on a philosophical level, the need for conveying big ideas is on the decline? What if the short tale is replacing the grand old narrative and in fact remains the only appropriate format in a small world that creates a growing number of small ideas in the absence of the big one(s)? Has the "end of history" (Fukuyama) bred the beginning of our stories? Are Twitter novels (and other micro-formats) perhaps the manifestation of a new plural, a new relativism that is not only salient in the fragmentation of media outlets ("Global Voices" instead of "Voice of America") but also the intellectual discourse itself? Or do they rather represent an activation and visualization of a plurality that has been latent anyway?

In a riveting BBC radio talk (listen to the full recording below), TED curator Chris Anderson (whose conference's mission is to promote "Ideas Worth Spreading") and philosopher and writer Alain de Botton recently discussed whether "the age of big ideas is over." De Botton opined that "I share the nostalgia for big ideas, but I'm also weary of them to some extent. I think that part of the problem of a big idea, as it's sometimes defined in the media, is that it has a certain simplicity and naivety to it. Many of the best ideas are really quite secular and quite small and have to do with very small but very important improvements to certain areas of life: an aspect of how to teach mass, a side of how you improve insulation in a building. These are not necessarily things that will get people out in the street, but they are significant ideas nevertheless."

But what about Obama? Wasn't his entire platform built on "big ideas?" Doesn’t his election contradict de Botton or at least suggest that big ideas will enjoy a renaissance? De Botton offers a nuanced answer to this: "He didn’t say 'I've got one big idea.' He said 'We can make a change.' And I think that’s the right way to do it. If you say you've got one big idea, and that idea somehow comes on stock as one big idea normally does, then you're in trouble. Much better to say we can find inspiration and we can make a change, and then look for the smaller ones."

November 01, 2008

Somebody Else’s Phone: Would you Look Through It?
If you found somebody else's phone, would you look through it? That’s a rhetorical question. Of course! Your phone is your life, at least if you’re under 25, and there’s nothing more interesting than the “Lives of Others.”

Wieden + Kennedy London translated the idea of “Cellular Oversharing” into a much gushed-about advertising campaign for Nokia. "Somebody else’s phone" depicts the lives of three twenty-something’s through their text messages, MMS, and pictures, and it essentially creates a new story format: the phone novel. Fusing scripted content with real life audience interaction, the campaign runs in ten different languages, following the characters’ evolving storylines through a 24/7 feed of content, across three time zones, over 6 weeks.

Nice idea although the Luon blog comments: “Sometimes it feels a bit like trying too hard. The advertising-tries-to-be-socially-smart’ thing, where it's not clear what is real and what is fake.” But that’s exactly the point. Fake authenticity -- I’ve already written about “Mad Men” on Twitter in this context -- is a burgeoning trend. Fake is fine as long as it feels real. We’ll see more of it in 2009.